Michael Cieply: With A BAFTA Win, ‘American Fiction’ Gets Points For Facing What Frets Us

Michael Cieply
·3 min read
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I share my colleague Pete Hammond’s fascination with Cord Jefferson’s BAFTA win for his screenplay adaptation, American Fiction. It is no small thing for a self-consciously American story to win a very British award against competition as formidable as Christopher Nolan, especially for a debut film.

Pete has a point when he notes that American Fiction, based on Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, about a black novelist who hits it big when his send-up of African-American cultural clichés is taken at face value, probably got traction as the only currently Oscar-nominated adaptation that is all about writing.

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Fair enough. But I’d go one step more.

In fact, American Fiction is the only Oscar-nominated script that takes a serious bite out of contemporary socio-political reality.

The rest, even that wild pink feminist fly-by Barbie, which does get tangled in reality, are in a sense doing what the phrase-coining trendspotter Faith Popcorn used to call “cocooning.” That is, they are curled up in a safe space, side-stepping or at most playing with events and issues—the broken border, political prosecutions, scary inflation, a meandering president, mass shootings, brutality abroad, sexual confusion, reparations, DEI—that have society very much on edge.

Barbie, like Poor Things, is a fantasy, riddled with fun and escapist stuff; whatever you make of the message, you can enjoy the ride. Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest, though razor-sharp, are remote, and rooted in the conflicts of a generation now gone. May December, Past Lives and Anatomy of a Fall are personal. As for Maestro, Leonard Bernstein died 33 years ago, when he was almost as old as I am now, and The Holdovers is set in 1970.

Only American Fiction—though based on a novel published 23 years ago—faces off, satirically, with actualities of a sort that Paddy Chayefsky, of Network fame, would have recognized.

For this, I’m sure, it has gotten a lot of points with screenwriters (their guild nominations are due tomorrow), who historically have recognized scripts that have dared to touch the real world and live wires. The 2013 Oscars brought Moneyball, Ides of March and Margin Call—all rooted in the contemporary social culture, with plenty of bite. The next year we had Captain Phillips and The Wolf of Wall Street, about real guys and real pirates, financial and otherwise. Then came American Sniper, and then The Big Short, Spotlight and Straight Outta Compton, all sufficiently current that the main characters and/or conflicts were still alive.

From around 2017, the focus seemed to shift—deeper into past with a Hidden Figures or Green Book or Trial of the Chicago Seven. Or more toward reality-touched fiction, as with Nomadland or Don’t Look Up.

But almost always, the film Academy’s writers have nominated carefully observational, current, potentially dangerous, reality-rooted scripts. And often enough, as with Women Talking last year—and perhaps with American Fiction this time—the final Oscar voters have honored those who bothered with issues that are bothering the rest of us.

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